Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1463-6204 (Print) 1469-9818 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20
Anachronism and the militant image: temporal
disturbances of the political imagination
Sara Nadal-Melsió
To cite this article: Sara Nadal-Melsió (2017) Anachronism and the militant image: temporal
disturbances of the political imagination, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 18:4, 331-339, DOI:
10.1080/14636204.2017.1380147
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2017.1380147
Published online: 22 Nov 2017.
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JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 18, NO. 4, 331–339
https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2017.1380147
INTRODUCTION
Anachronism and the militant image: temporal disturbances
of the political imagination
Sara Nadal-Melsió
Independent scholar, New York, NY, USA
This special issue critically engages with key examples of Spain’s militant cinema from the
1970s and early 1980s, highlighting both their formal heterogeneity and complex temporalities. Very much like Pere Portabella’s 1976 Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones para
una proyección de interés público, the period at hand appears as an amalgam of contradictory temporalities that coexist without ever coalescing into a bigger whole. Both Teresa
Vilarós and Elena Delgado have questioned the effectiveness of perpetuating a narrative
of the Transición and the interregnum that preceded it as a seamless temporal continuum.1 This narrative effectively managed to transform the desire for “change” into a codified call for continuity and normalization. Considering how quickly these films were
rendered obsolete, this volume interrogates the visual protocols that were activated by
a normative, or consensual, temporality
Indeed, the term “militant film” itself carries much of the weight of the promises and
failures of the 1960s and remains tainted by the violent iconographies of the 1970s. The
transformation of ETA’s anti-Francoist militancy into terrorism provides an extreme
example of Spain’s violent awakening into the Transición and el desencanto. Spain’s temporal and political contingencies before and during the Transición do not figure in this
issue as peripheral or isolated but as constituting a unique vantage point from which to
re-examine the European experience of authoritarianism and political violence and its
anticipatory relationship with the hegemonic neoliberalism that followed them.
This special issue is specifically concerned with the survival of a militant visual language
and a series of politically inflected gestures that, accurately or not, evoke earlier periods. The
perceived need for chronological precedence deserves to be explored critically, and this
volume proposes we read it as a symptom of a certain temporal turn in the understanding
of political art – as even the most cursory glimpse at the programming of Spanish museums,
galleries and filmotecas in the last 10 years will confirm.2 This need to document, archive and
even re-enact, belongs to a very distinct political genealogy and should not be conflated
with the contemporary call for memorialization or the concomitant emergence of nostalgia
in the Spanish public sphere. This documentary impulse is explicitly concerned with history
as a political possibility rather than with memory as such.3 Interestingly, the art gallery and
the museum have become key contexts for evaluating anachronism’s political potential.4
What makes Spanish militant cinema particularly fascinating is its inscription of its own
temporal displacement. As a consequence, while European militant cinema is generally
chronologically circumscribed from 1966 to 1977, Spain’s militant production extends
CONTACT Sara Nadal-Melsió
nadal.sara@gmail.com
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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well beyond that frame and often projects a self-conscious sense of lateness and anachronism. Accordingly, the issue at hand focuses on a narrow set of examples (Helena
Lumbreras, Joaquim Jordà, El Colectivo de Cine de Madrid, José María Berzosa and Pere
Portabella) – to the detriment of a more panoramic view of the period’s filmic output –
in order to explore the conceptual implications linked to a productive understanding of
temporal displacement.5 Joaquim Jordà’s 1980 factory film Numax presenta, for instance,
is a latecomer to the “genre” and in some ways reads like a crystallization of its promises
and failures, skillfully combining hindsight and mourning. In other cases, belatedness and
obsolescence are mobilized strategically to different effect. The left-wing, critical costumbrismo of Helena Lumbreras, which strongly echoes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s interest in the
working class’s seemingly regressive productions of knowledge, is contrasted with José
María Berzosa and Pere Portabella’s denunciation of cultural obsolescence as a
symptom of Francoism’s ideological bankruptcy. In addition, this issue includes an artistic
intervention that centers on the visual archeology of both the militant and industrial pasts
of the Basque Country. In this way, it responds to the fact that artistic practice and experimentation remain closest in spirit to the formal protocols of militant images of the past, as
they strive to breach the constraints of theory and practice. As a result, this issue takes a
compositional approach to the layers of anachronism crossing over each other in the
midst of Spain’s political untimeliness so that they may illuminate one another.
Since Walter Benjamin’s call for a critical “tiger’s leap into the past”, failed promises and
revolutionary failures have become a historical goldmine for the political imagination.
Therefore, the call for the transformation of contingency into potentiality and choice as
well as the political exploitation of anachronism has become pervasive. In this introduction, I will attempt a brief genealogy of anachronism in current debates in order to
situate the temporality of Spanish militant cinema as an exceptional case study that complicates some of the received ideas that populate these discussions.
The complex temporalities of the cinematic image are key to this volume’s political
mobilization of Spain’s recent past. Such a politicization of the temporal is by no means
a conceptual abstraction, but rather is an exercise in materialism and materialization, as
it entails a continued practice of historicization and a renewed interest in factuality. In
this respect, cinema’s temporal agility, its ability to cross over and recombine different
temporalities, is key to the politicization of the temporal. The fact that the cinematic
image can also be played backwards is not just a technological quirk but part and
parcel of the ways in which cinema forever transformed our understanding of time.
Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s early insights into the time-image owe much to cinema as a
medium; its temporal intensity, the density of its actuality, is a direct reaction to filmic technologies. Like the Spanish film theorist and activist Juan Piqueras, Benjamin was a contemporary of the first wave of militant filmmaking and a witness to its political promise.
Although the “dialectic image” is to a large extent a Marxist reconfiguration of Benjamin’s
“time-image”; it recurs in the temporal turn taken by the contemporary aesthetics of
Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman and others, and has retained its currency in
Spanish curatorial practices. Hence, in the critical genealogy invoked by this special
issue’s rehistoricization of the militant image cinematic, time functions as a central political
category.
This special issue, though not claiming to be exhaustive in its coverage of Spain’s extensive visual archive of the 1970s and early 1980s, aims to highlight militant film’s attempt to
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333
document and implicate itself in a plurality of political possibilities that, for the most part,
did not come to fruition.6 Accordingly, it concentrates on militant film’s political mobilization of its own production whereby the cinematic image is not political because of its
content but rather because its materiality and the conditions for its existence are constituted politically. Therefore, these films produce rather than reflect their political object.
Numax presenta, El campo para el hombre and any of the films of the Colectivo de Cine
de Madrid are equally as militant in their means of production and distribution as they
are in their viewing and filming processes. The political operates here as a set of social
relationships of production. The theoretical and practical commitment of these films lies
precisely in delinking the stages in the production of images from the notion of spectacle
and industry, and rearranging them differently to produce an alternative effect. Therefore,
they emphasize the event of cinema and its production rather than be satisfied with a
purely visual fascination with the filmic image.7
Cinema is, to an even greater extent than photography, the product of an encounter, of
an event. The collaboration involved in the making of a film can be regarded as a democratic practice, a politicized social relationship. Militant film then is not just an expansion of
our political vision but an intervention in its conditions of possibility. Therefore, although
the indexical quotient of cinema is undeniable, militant cinema is concerned with its own
factuality, with the traces of the event that produced it. We cannot remain at the level of
cinema as technological reproduction. The “political”, therefore, is not an attribute of militant film but a trace of the constituent event of cinema in the Spain of the 1970s.
Accordingly, these militant images belong to “an order of pure events”, as Gilles
Deleuze put it in his volume on the time-image. That is, they attach to and detach themselves from the world in which they originate to then return later as a supplement to what
was already there in the beginning. Thus, they are caught midway between representing
and transforming the world. It is in the space between these two functions – documentation and intervention – that their politicization takes place, in the form of the cinematic
event.
Further, these films often survived and were transmitted through conversations in
screening rooms as part of a generation’s political socialization, as events rather than
just images: as the memory of a shared political space, and the witnessing of its ephemeral
emergence and sudden disappearance. More importantly, militant film was addressed to
“users” rather than viewers, as it was meant to be politically “useful”. Filmic images participated in a larger political arena that they were designed to help configure. Therefore, political film needs to be understood as a social object, a product of specific and contested
conditions of possibility where formal and content-based commitment overlapped. One
could say that the politicization of film functioned as a compensatory democratic practice
that balanced out the democratic deficit in the Spanish national context.
Because of these very specific characteristics, some of the most widely accepted critical
strategies to deal with the anachronism of images exhibit limitations when dealing with
the complex temporalities of Spain’s belated militant film. Although nearly all of the
essays in this volume share a consistent engagement with contemporary theories of anachronism, they are all grounded in historical and political practices that run counter to the
aestheticization to which the concept has become susceptible. I will trace here just two of
the most recurrent critical approaches to anachronism and highlight their problematic
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recourse to the aesthetic: Jacques Rancière’s poetic anachronism and Georges Didi-Huberman’s heuristic anachronism.
In his 1996 “The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth”, Rancière develops
a critique of the fear of anachronism in the Annales School and its tendency to obscure
political events that interrupt the temporal continuum, mentality or ideological semblance
of a given period. Interestingly, Rancière also claims here that anachronism is fundamentally a “poetic” concept. That is, while his claims for the need to embrace anachronism are
political, over the course of his argument anachronism reveals itself as a modality of the
poetic. This is the crux of Rancière’s general argument, as it hinges on a reconfigured
relationship between the political and the aesthetic. However, by revealing the aesthetic
protocols of untimeliness, he also curtails its political scope:
There is no anachronism. But there are modes of connection that in a positive sense we call anachronies:
events, ideas, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning circulate in ways that escape any
contemporaneity, any identity with time “itself”. (47)
The passage is worth unpacking, however briefly. On the one hand, anachronism disappears to become a “mode” that refuses to identify not with “a time” but with “time
itself”. Rancière’s long-standing critique of identity gets in the way of the political intentions he proclaims. While disidentification remains a crucial strategy for thinking critically
about the political, by being equated to anachrony, understood here as a disidentification
with time, anachronism risks losing sight of any kind of historical specificity. By becoming
anti-historical, anachronism is politically deactivated.
Nevertheless, because time, like politics, is a relational phenomenon, being “contrary to
time” amounts to choosing not to intervene in the shared experience of our present. Insistence on historical intervention is the how these Spanish films constitute their militancy.
Their use of anachronism cannot simply devolve into disavowal without concrete content.
In their historical specificity, the examples studied in this volume prove over and over
again that anachronism belongs to the realm of historicity, more precisely, to the empirical
reality of historical experience. Thus, while they productively mobilize Rancière’s conceptual insights, they also reject their philosophical abstraction in favor of the historical and
the political.
For his part, Georges Didi-Huberman’s emphasis on the temporal content of the image,
what he calls the “sovereignty of anachronism”, is the basis of his understanding of art
history. His “heuristic anachronism” is an effective visual dispositif or a protocol that privileges
memory over other experiences of time (Didi-Huberman 70–76). When, in glossing Aby Warburg’s Nachleben, he points out that most images both precede and survive their viewers, he
assumes and relies on an aesthetic continuum on which the image’s content remains strangely stable. While Didi-Huberman never questions the aesthetic nature of his examples (which
always require the existence of a cultural past in order to exist), he remains oddly blind to their
political possibilities. His images of the people are frozen because the event that produced
them remains obscured as it does not fit into his visual iconography. At most, the art historian
works within, or rather activates, a montage of never-ending anachronisms.8 It is here that the
“art” in art history reveals its political limitations.
Yet, it is clear in any of the examples explored in this issue that art’s political import is
contextual rather than intrinsic. It is, on the one hand, the expression of an encounter with
non-art and, on the other, the product of a social relationship. Neither the political nor the
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aesthetic has any ontological valence unto itself,9 they are both relational and partial, and
depend on the activation of the possibilities contained within the context in which they
are situated.10 Militant cinema’s aesthetic impurity constantly echoes its constitutive
and relational heterogeneity.
At the same time, it is often aesthetic judgment that is used to dismiss militant artistic
practices like the ones presented in this issue. Aesthetic judgment can in fact become a
censuring apparatus, as it presupposes a homogeneous temporality, a shared “horizon
of expectations” that eliminates that which do not belong, and that is also capable of
incorporating other discourses into its premises. Consequently, it is sometimes extremely
difficult to distinguish between the overlapping judgments that operate in relation to militant film.11 The critical dismissal of political art, and of militant cinema in particular, seems
to fall into one of the following categories:
(1) A temporal critique that considers them either “too early” or “too late” vis-à-vis the
context they engage.12
(2) An aesthetic judgment that deems them “too formal/experimental/aesthetic” or “not
formal/experimental/aesthetic enough”.
(3) A political assessment that labels them “too political” or “not political enough”.
These three kinds of judgments appear to belong to distinct spheres (the political, the
temporal and the aesthetic), yet they reveal striking similarities. All three logics are subsumed under protocols of taste, of aesthetic semblance as a category of inclusion or exclusion. The logic of excess or lack exhibits an incapacity to deal with the rupture that marks
the event of militant cinema. To be more or less of something is still to be more or less of
that same thing. The danger here is for the aesthetic, the political and the temporal to
become oddly interchangeable. However, the filmic examples examined in this issue constantly stress the unstable relationship among these three spheres and are presented as
interventions that reassemble those relationships in a novel way. The problem of the perceived anachronism of militant film may paradoxically be a result of the promise of
newness it contains. Consequently, the difficulty of adjusting the event of militant film
to existing protocols is a measure of its success at interrupting the logic of identity and
equivalences that lurks behind those judgments.
A political discourse that inhabits multiple, and often contradictory, temporalities, anachronism can be seen as a strategic reaction to the foreclosing of our political future.
Endowed with the ability to harvest latent forms of the past in order to recover them politically, anachronism invokes the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg’s glossing of revolutionary time
as “I was, I am, I shall be”, while upsetting its narrative progression. Indeed, the use of the
archive in contemporary time-based art forms is above all an exercise in recombination,
rearrangement and ultimately of filmic montage. Militant cinema may have initiated an
exercise in the reconfiguration of the temporal that goes well beyond the hopeful
embrace of anachronism as the refuge of political promise.
While it may be clear that temporal impurity is part and parcel of political discourse as
the imagination of a heterotopic otherwise, militancy is often understood as a type of ideological and totalizing avant-gardism steeped in notions of futurity and in orthodox understandings of narrative progression. Yet, an interesting reversal takes place in the Spanish
films explored in this issue. While official late-Francoist and Transición culture was
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strategically focused on the necessary unfolding of a predetermined future in order to
survive, both political militancy and visual experimentalism exhibited a renewed interest
in documenting the historical past, both as an archive of the factual and as a source for the
possible. Hence, the notion of avant-gardism, both political and aesthetic, was turned on
its head so that futurity might be traded for anachronism as a source of counter-images for
a cinematic militancy. Yet paradoxically, rather than leave it at that, Spanish militant film
points to the fact that the ultimate goal of this reversal was to affect and reclaim the contemporary by embracing its temporal complexity and unpredictability.
Although anachronism is absolutely essential to our experience of temporality, it
cannot become an unquestioned paradigm when dealing with political art from the
past. After all, a militant political understanding of present conditions has never only
been about contesting the present but also about how to influence the future. In fact, militancy is often expressed as a quest and a desire to become of one’s time or, at the very
least, to intervene in one’s time. The role of contemporaneity therefore cannot be
absent in any discussion of the temporality of militancy.
Yet the contemporary is a not a seamless temporal unity either. If it were, there would
no point in attempting to intervene in it politically. An understanding of the contemporary
must also address its anticipatory nature, which resonates deeply with the political
promise of militant cinema. Contemporaneity plays a fundamental role in militancy’s political desire, even when it takes the form of an absence (as was the case during the period
at hand in Spain). Therein lies the promise of the political.
Hence, the films studied in this issue should be seen as a chance to further explore the
role of temporality during a crucial period in Spain that has had a long-lasting effect on our
collective perception of the promises and failures of the militant image. In this way, these
at-times almost-forgotten militant films do not fail to remind us that the time of the political is always necessarily also a politics of time.
Personal note
While the autobiographical may seem oddly out of place in academic discourse, I am convinced it is deeply entangled with my fascination with anachronism as a temporal palimpsest. A pervasive sense of temporal displacement accompanied my growing up in the Spain
of the 1970s and 1980s. Temporality was synonymous with nonbelonging. It was an experience in the interstices of temporalities that could never be reconciled. My grandparents
belonged to the defeated Republican peasantry. Thus, I was familiar both with the anachronistic rhythms of rural life and the political displacement of the defeated and silenced. In
hindsight, I often wonder if my grandparents’ stubborn embrace of rural anachronism,
together with its at times reactionary morality, was not a confused attempt to protect themselves from the broken political promises that defined their life by creating the false continuity of an inherited habitus. My parents, on the other hand, embraced urban life and
upward mobility, rejecting both rural ideology and the democratic memory of their
parents – as it in effect superimposed the temporal and economic unevenness they were
determined to flee. Thus, they bought into the upward mobility of a present that allowed
them to travel seamlessly from Francoism to neoliberalism through consumerism, understood as a symptom of modernity’s temporal dominance. Meanwhile, I spent many years
at a staunchly Francoist school that was at pains to keep at bay the images of Alaska and
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her Bola de cristal or Terra d’escudella, or the occasional encounter with experimental
theater, film, dance and music happening nearby. These intermittent disruptions heightened my sense that the temporalities of my everyday life quite simply did not add up. In
an attempt to escape the oppressive and mediocre environment of that religious private
school, I managed to transfer to a secular and prestigious public institut and had a brush
with the exclusionary practices of the educated Catalan bourgeoisie for whom people
with my background were an obsolete absurdity. As a result of these mismatched temporalities, the celebratory and forward-looking nation-state that emerged during the Barcelona
Olympic Games looked very much like a spectacular fairy tale. In retrospect, it was only
through my migration to the United States, by inhabiting the presentism of a nationstate to which I am clearly “alien”, that it became possible for me to discern a personal
and historical experience in which temporality continues to be a puzzle.
Notes
1. Vilarós offers a complex diagnosis of the fantasies underpinning the Transición in El mono del
desencanto: Una critica cultural de la transición española. Delgado’s La nación singular: Fantasías de la normalidad democrática española builds on that earlier critique, tracing the legacy of
the Transición by examining Spain’s continued attachment to consensus and normativity from
1996 to 2011.
2. There were two exhibitions in Barcelona at the beginning of 2017 that resonate with the topic
of this special issue. The first was a retrospective of Alexander Kluge’s political interventions in
the protocols of militant cinema, Gardens of Cooperation. The other – yet another instance of
the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s continued rehistoricization of Spain’s cultural
dissidences – titled Gelatina dura: Històries escamotejades dels 80, focused on the visual counterculture of late Francoism and the Transición up to the Barcelona Olympics and the specularization of the city. In addition, the Filmoteca de Catalunya screened a series of rarely seen
films of the period (from Jesús Garay’s Manderley to Paulino Viota’s Con uñas y dientes) alongside more recent attempts to engage with and reenact this filmic and historical legacy (such as
Luis López Carrasco’s El futuro or Chema de la Peña’s 23 F: La película). These two shows, as
well as the film series, share a critical genealogy and present a common goal: a call for alternatives to the official chronological understanding of temporal progression and a political investment in the anachronism of images that interrupt that continuum. This approach has by now
become hegemonic.
3. There is another important development of anachronism that is invested in the return of
repressed images from the past. For example, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma anachronism takes the form of a trauma – so that George Stevens’s first images of the Nazi camps
haunt A Place in the Sun. Likewise, in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the historical dimension is a result of the suffering of the past. There has been a central Derridian derivation of this
traumatic understanding of history in Spanish cultural studies. Jo Labanyi’s “History and Hauntology: Or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past” has been by far the most influential.
The JSCS has recently published an issue on Spectralities, edited by Steven Marsh, that builds
on Labanyi’s insights and extends into a reading of ghostliness as a constitutive property of
the moving image.
4. Portabella’s 2016 Informe general II: El rapte d’ Europa, the second part of the landmark 1976
Informe general, which itself had a very reduced audience at the time of its release, has been
almost exclusively screened in museums and other art institutions, and consequently derives a
large part of its relevance from an anachronistic relationship to part 1. Moreover, the screenings have, in turn, exponentially increased the availability of the 1976 political film and retroactively transformed it into a foundational work for the period at large. The role of the
museum in the renewed attention to militant filmic practices cannot be underestimated.
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5. The history of the reception of Fernando Solanas’s and Octavio Getino’s 1968 La hora de los
hornos in Spanish militant and clandestine circles alone could easily justify a special issue of
its own (Mestman). The same would be true of the influence of figures like Fernando Birri
or Oscar Masotta and their transatlantic trajectories, which could not be addressed in this
issue but also merit critical reassessment.
6. The most complete history of Spanish militant cinema to date is Lydia García-Merás’s “El cine
de la disidencia”.
7. Nevertheless, one should be careful not to overstate the role of dissent and rupture in anachronism. Anachronism can also be used, as it was during Francoism, to legitimate the
present and create fictions of continuity. More importantly, it achieved that through a
rupture in historical experience. This was clear to Ernst Bloch in 1932 when, in “Non-contemporaneity and Obligation to its Dialectic”, he urged the Left to employ the disruptive powers of
temporalities that “contradict the now” before they were fully incorporated by National Socialism in the guise of reactionary nostalgia. Even Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, famously described how reactionary anachronisms “anxiously conjure up the spirit of
the past to their service” to disguise the irruption of their newness (15).
8. The Uprisings exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman at the Jeu de Paume provides a perfect
example of the limitations of this approach. The show is an endless chain of images of
revolt that relate to one another through iconographic analogy. The events to which the
images belong are relegated to the anecdotal and, as a result, the political content of their
“insurrections” is flattened into quotable images. Examples can be added to or subtracted
from this analogical series without any consequence to their aestheticized continuity. Thus,
the photographic materials on the Spanish Civil War that were added when the exhibition travelled from Paris to Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Nacional de Catalunya did not introduce any significant change to the art historical premise of the display.
9. Rancière’s the political/le politique seems to refer to some intrinsic political nature that
somehow manages to survive the messiness of politics/la politique. In contrast, Spanish militant film makes it clear that the goal is to travel from one sphere into the other, that is, to use
the form of the political to intervene in the practice of politics.
10. This is the precise structure of Arendt’s thinking in what maybe her best-known definition of
the political relationality: “Man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of
man. There is therefore no political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is
established as relationships”. (95).
11. Ariella Azoulay proposes a return to Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Kantian judgment of taste
in order to question the nature of what she calls our contemporary “political judgment of
taste”. Azoulay argues that the phrase “This is political” contains an implicit judgment of
taste that subsumes it. It is therefore the expression of a reflexive rule that has the power
to deny the political content of images. My three categories add a temporal dimension to
her insights (92–95).
12. Kristin Ross traces the origins of Rancière’s interest in temporality to his 1975 critique of
Althusser in La leçon d’Althusser. According to Ross’ glossing of Rancière, theorists like Althusser would never meet with the temporality of an insurrection like May 1968, for to them “it is
never the moment, and it will never be the moment” (24).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Sara Nadal-Melsió has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and New York
University and is now a collaborator at the art residency SOMA in Mexico City. Her essays have
appeared in Diacritics, RHM, JSCS and Avenç, as well as in various edited volumes. She is also the
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339
coauthor of Alrededor de/Around, a book on the photography and architecture of the last turn of the
century. She is currently working on a manuscript, titled Europe and the Wolf, on the transmission of
dissent in Europe’s musical legacy through a reading of contemporary art and experimental cinema.
In February 2018, she will co-curate (with Carles Guerra) an exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at the
Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona.
Works cited
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